Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

Smith, Annette
Césaire, Aimé
Eshleman, Clayton

Paperback

Series: Wesleyan Poetry

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $17.95

ISBN10: 0819564524
ISBN13: 9780819564528
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: Sep 24 2001
Pages: 100
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.37 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.32
Language: English

Césaire's masterpiece that reaches the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Césaire considered his style a beneficial madness that could break into the forbidden and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.

Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Césaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. André Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Césaire.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.

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